An historical cop-outBy ANDRE BAGOO Monday, November 23 2009
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Dr Hollis "Chalkdust" Liverpool...
IN THE BOOK A Brief History of the Commonwealth, Dr Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool, after 134 pages, concludes: “Looking back at the history of the Commonwealth, it would be true to say that the British system of granting independence to her colonies was made ‘flexible and adaptable’ enough as to allow the nations a wide choice in areas of governance.”
“It would be also true,” Liverpool argues, “to say that Britain very early realised that domination by one nation over another served the interests of neither party. As such, she helped to pioneer the formation of the Commonwealth and strove over the years to build and preserve it.”
To add insult, Chalkie’s very last sentence, coming after a book which falls short in terms of its analysis of the historic implications of the Commonwealth, is: “Thus, today, the Commonwealth can be summed up as an organisation of people of many creeds, races, and nationalities who,
motivated by English customs and culture, have come together for the promotion of good governance and stable environments, with the hope of making the world a better place, in which all people can dwell in peace, harmony and majesty.”
A Brief History of the Commonwealth aims to give us a snapshot of the Commonwealth and to provide exactly what the title suggests: a history. It is a timely publication, launched this month when this country is to host a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Port-of-Spain. Dr Liverpool takes care to set out the history of the Commonwealth, going as far back as Columbus, Vasco Da Gama and Frobisher in what he describes as the “Old” Commonwealth. There is a chapter on the birth of Canada, another on the founding of Australia, others on New Zealand and South Africa.
For Liverpool, the entrance of India somehow changed things, creating a “new” Commonwealth which also extended to the British Caribbean. With the movement towards independence after the World Wars, there is the birth of a “modern” Commonwealth. In this “modern” Commonwealth, “the presence of India and Pakistan as free nations in the Commonwealth changed the organisation from being what some called the ‘White’ to perhaps a ‘Brown and White one’,” Liverpool writes.
Liverpool manages to give us a lot of information quickly (and innovatively, too, through his use of calypso as a means of communicating Trinidadian social ideas). But one gets the sense that this is a book planned, perhaps, for very young secondary school students and that Chalkie did not have time to really go in-depth into the sociological issues behind the Commonwealth.
For instance, his analytical treatment of the idea of Caribbean independence includes the following single sentence: “It was the feeling in many circles that Britain was anxious to shed her political baggage obtained over years of her exercise of imperialism, by granting independence to any state that wanted it.”
The sentence is bizarre because what lies behind it is not examined in any substantial depth anywhere else in the book. Additionally, from a modern historical perspective, it seems just plain wrong; ignoring as it does the key role economics has played in the history of the colonies, including the drive—from within Britain after World War II—to shed imperialist annexes.
One does not have to look far, some may say, to argue that the de-colonisation exercise conducted by Britain in the last century was, in fact, a failure. Colonies, long divided for the purpose of maintaining and consolidating colonial rule, have simply floundered into independence “half-made”, as Mr Naipaul once wrote; superficially emulating the customs and constitution of the former motherland to disastrous effect with constitutional crisis after crisis. The fact that the Commonwealth arguably served as a half-way house; a kind of sop to placate those who were at the time worried or sceptical about being abandoned by Britain, is completely ignored in this book which, instead, presents less than half of the full picture.
“Jamaica is today a Constitutional Monarchy headed by the Queen of England who is herself represented by the Governor General. A country of 4,444 square miles, inhabited by 2.8 million people, Jamaica is famous for its world-class athletes such as Herb Mckenley, Donald Quarrie and Usain Bolt,” writes Liverpool as he sums up the state of that former colony. He does not mention crime or the Jamaican Government’s role in the destruction of its natural coastline for the sake of attracting British, European and North American tourists.
Similarly, Liverpool moves on to Barbados and, later, Trinidad and Tobago which is famous for “calypso, steelband and chutney”. And let’s not forget Carnival. The country’s complex relationship with its British-derived constitution and the problems that have arisen because of its odd shape with our multi-cultural society nowhere features, even though it is pointed out that throughout the Commonwealth, former colonies en masse appeared to have adopted the Westminster conventions.
That this is written by one of our own, is, perhaps, the greatest shock of this book. Another shock is that it has been published by the University of Trinidad and Tobago, our very own university.
